Sunday, May 25, 2014

We await news of the percentage of
voters who went to the urns here in Spain to vote in the European
Parliament elections. In the 25 years since they did this for the
first time, participation has fallen every year. Given the
Brussels-imposed austerity of the last few years, it'll be
astonishing if this doesn't happen this time round

Listening to UK politicians dealing
with the results of Thursday's local elections, what was increasingly
clear was the reluctance to admit they can't take the measures
required by the electorate and that this is because they're
constrained by the EU. In other words, they're impotent. And so redundant. As long as the UK stays in the
EU, they should be replaced, if at all, by more civil servants to
implement the laws made - in a way no one understands - in Brussels
and Strasbourg. But they won't be.

In a move designed to infuriate
Madrid - and perhaps many Catalans - the Catalan president has
sought formal association with the Francophone world. If granted,
this would oblige his government to favour French over English in
schools. This is something which fell out of favour here in Spain at least 30
years ago. Worse, he didn't even tell the Spanish President he was
doing it. It'll be fascinating to see how the Paris plays this. And
how Madrid reacts.

Looking at a list of countries with a
high proportion of doctors to people, I saw the name Niue. At first I
thought this might be the Spanish acronym for the UAE but obviously
not. Resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt that Niue is an island country
in the Pacific Ocean, 2,400 km northeast of New Zealand. Its land
area is 260 square km and its population is around 1,400. Anyway, the
article stressed that this statistics differs by up to 50% between
Spanish regions. In the UK, of course, it's not allowed to differ
much between towns, otherwise the angry cry of 'postcode lottery'
goes up.

I caught the last 15m minutes of the
Champions' final last night, on the radio on the night train back to Pontevedra
from Madrid. It took me a minute or three to work out that Bálé was,
in fact, an Hispanicised Gareth Bale